The coming of the Internet and Information Age has brought with it an explosion in the volume of information that is available to the public. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this information, for example, information relating to travel and travel-related topics, is available to the public only in an unorganized fashion. The sheer quantity of this information can make it nearly impossible for an individual to locate relevant information. Furthermore, there may be at the same time an actual shortage of the type of first-hand, personalized, particularly-relevant information that the individual may desire to locate.
For example, in the case of an individual seeking to plan a vacation, or merely seeking to learn more about a distant location, it is difficult to locate first-hand, particularly-relevant, travel-related information. The individual may rely upon his or her circle of trusted friends or even acquaintances to provide specific first-hand travel advice or experience information. Unfortunately, such advice and information will necessarily be limited by the number of the individual's friends or acquaintances, as well as by the travel habits of such persons. Travel agents may seek to provide an individual with customized travel-related information. However, the travel-related information from travel agents may not be first-hand or objective, being limited to the travel experiences of the agent and/or the agent's clients. Guidebooks may be used to obtain a limited amount of information concerning a travel destination. However, guidebooks suffer from several deficiencies, including the somewhat generic and oftentimes dated nature of their information. So too with travel-related magazines: the travel-information can be generic, rather than providing the sort of comprehensive and personalized first-hand information desired.
Internet-accessible travel magazines typically contain professionally-written travel content. However, the relevance of this content depends in large part upon how closely the personal preferences of the professional travel writer matches the personal preferences of the individual seeking information. The same is true in the case of Internet-accessible opinion sites, which are limited in their ability to take into account the personal preferences of the user.
Thus, there exists a real and continuing need for a computer-oriented method and apparatus designed to provide personalized content information, taking into account both the personal preferences of the user, as well as the personal preferences and/or other unique information of the content information provider.